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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: May 14, 2006 at 10:08 pm by Eve Tushnet

2006-05-14T22:08:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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I LIKE NICE PEOPLE, THEY’RE THE ONES YOU CAN’T STAND: Review of Leanne Payne’s The Broken Image. (lightly edited version) A couple people had recommended this book to me. It’s, I guess, a guide to healing lesbionicity, or something. (I read it for work-related reasons. I might act crazy, but I don’t smoke enough crack to read this sort of thing for fun.)

Yeah… I had a really hard time with this book, even though I also gained from it. So.

BLAME CANADA!: OK, the first enormous problem with the book is that it’s really caught up in origin stories. How come you’re so messed up? And… ha. It’s been fairly humiliating for me to realize that I actually fit one of her profiles, to some extent (and to her credit, she offers several different profiles, doesn’t assume that every Gay Story is the same); and yet I find her whole approach completely awful.

First off, she tends, especially in the sections dealing with women, to divide people into Villains and Victims. (Guess which one I am! …Last to guess wins a pony.) Either you’re a predatory lesbo or you’re a sweet little straight girl turned to the Dark Side by bad childhood experiences. And just… you know, I got an F in the class “Children And How To Be One,” okay? But I’m pretty sure I don’t fit her profile for Villain (even though there are a couple things, in the general neighborhood of Teh Gay, for which I do really feel guilty) or Victim (even though Payne talks about separation from one’s mother prior to the formation of solid memories, which, because of surgery to correct serious birth defects, I would guess that I experienced). And it kills me that these are the only terms in which she can see people with same-sex attractions.

JESUS IS MAGIC. Another part of my huge problem with this book is the way that it has this one cool, jargon-laden form of prayer (“listening prayer”) that supposedly never fails. It’s a cure-all. And it’s just weird–you’re supposed to, like, relive your birth trauma. No kidding.

And you know–when you ask me, “Hey, if you really had to pick one: Are you a big dyke because girls are pretty, or because you got hospitalized at a young age and had some kind of freaky separation trauma?”–it’s really not that hard for me to answer. I know for a fact that girls are pretty. I’m not sure how I could ever know what the effects of the whole birth-defects/surgery thing were, if any. I don’t remember it, it was a long time ago, most people get over it; honestly, how would I even know?

And that’s part of what bothers me so much about the focus on “the origin of the problem.” It’s so much about finding someone or some incident to blame. It makes everything you do wrong yet another instance of Why Teh Gay People Iz Irreparably Damaged. It’s the old, cruel dichotomy of Best Little Boy in the World vs. Tragic Statistic. And it’s impossible to disprove, because everyone has some traumatic incident in the past. (And no matter how many heteros have the exact same backstory, apparently it’s only interesting and troubling when the kid turns out gay. Seriously–if all Payne’s different Primrose Paths to Poofery worked, the entire world would be gayer than a picnic basket. Color me a skeptical pink.)

Payne’s whole approach struck me as blame-oriented, and in sharp contrast to the approach of e.g. St Augustine. I think both Payne and Augustine would agree that every sin is the result of a misdirected virtue; but Payne focuses so much on the sinfulness that it’s impossible to tell what she thinks the misdirected virtue is. You can’t work backwards to figure out how you should rightly express the virtue if you can’t even identify it.

SOLID GOLD EASY ACTION. And Payne’s whole shtik strikes me as too easy. If this chick has figured out how to cure Teh Gay through prayer–hey, whoopee!! No need for embracing the Cross anymore! Why didn’t I think of that? Christ is fluffy!

You know, I doubt it’s that easy.

MERRY CHRISTMAS, C.S. LEWIS–or, Leather Elbows on a Tweed Coat/Oh, Is That the Best You Can Do? To get even more scattershot than this post already is–Payne quotes from Lewis quite a bit. She quotes a big chunk of a letter he wrote to Sheldon Vanauken, in which he said (apropos of homosexuality), “Every disability is a vocation.”

And… there’s a lot of fruit to be gained from that. If you buckle down, stop whining, and make yourself say, “Okay, these temptations aren’t what God wants for me; nevertheless here they are; what good can be wrung from them? How can they shape my vocation?”, actually I think you’ll find an enormous amount of spiritual wealth. I think you’ll find that your homosexuality (or any other strong temptation) really can be transformed into a vocation, made sublime. There may well be saints who would not have attained Heaven were it not for their temptations and their spiritual “disadvantages.” God has given you your struggles for a reason. I really believe that.

But even Lewis and Payne (who are presented, really, as “the best you people can hope for”–anger. Like fire. Flames. On the side of my face…) won’t cash out the meaning of that cryptic statement about “vocation.” I mean… not that I necessarily trust them to! But it really got to me that in this same letter, Lewis noted, as if it would be obvious, that he had destroyed the letters of the homosexual man to whom he was referring. Of course, these are the sort of letters one destroys. (…These are the things we don’t talk about. Inter Christianos non nominatur.)

Oh, but it’s such a surprise when gay people are bitter about the Church.

ART FOR ART’S SAKE: OK, so having railed at the book for so long, I should say that I loved the clarity with which it proclaimed that art flows from spiritual discipline. I loved the book’s focus on the imagination and the fact that the imagination flourishes when it feeds on Christ. (Although even there, Payne feels the need to assert that homosexuals are less creative. What.) …I also thought the emphasis on forgiveness was really stellar. So… I can’t recommend this, at all. But it does try hard, which… is better than average.

Which is why I need to write more.

[eta: People who were able to read this book with more charity than I could muster might find some of the above overstated–for example, Payne does talk about one or two people with non-gay-related problems–but honestly, I think what I’ve written here captures the overwhelming atmosphere of the book.]

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